Playlouder - Music is the Network

When did this instant covers culture begin? Was it (as I suspect) around the dawn of MySpace when I remember such beauties as The Blankket’s ‘Hey Ya!’, Busted’s ‘Where is the love?’ and Lemar’s sublime ‘I believe in a thing called love’?

With the world at our fingertips, recording a cover and getting it out there now takes a brief moment (and fuck all thought – you don’t have to write anything, just have ears).

I recall a brief period of purchasing CD singles I hadn’t heard especially for the B-sides. It was bound to get tired.

Now after Best British Male™ Mark Ronson’s  celebrated, disgustingly funky undressing of ‘Just’ and what I consider a downright cruelly-inflated version of The Zutons’ unremarkably pleasant (but remarkably recent) scouse sixties-style single ‘Valerie’, we’re on a slippery slope to a pit full of shit where the elite flail around in ecstasy slapping each other on the back and swallowing each other’s faeces. Outside the pit, wannabes are scaling the slippery walls, longing to take a dive themselves.

I’d say 98% of bands have some half-arsed trendy cover on their MySpace right now. Where is the love? Is it my fault for spending more time online than I do listening to Radio 1?

‘Bleeding Love’ by Leona Lewis had been around for a split second (well, a couple of months) before a cover by Jamie Scott turned up on the B-side to ‘Standing in the rain’, and now The Worst Band Since The Fratellis™, The Wombats have covered it and it’s out on the NME’s new super special exclusive load of covers CD. I still haven’t heard the flipping original and I somehow doubt it’ll have the desired effect now. As for that covers Cd, they’ll probably all be up on the artists’ MySpace pages anyway so they’re about as exclusive as my ass. Hmmm… perhaps that’s a bad analogy.

Anyway, you can listen to four of the covers online now:

    * The Wombats - Bleeding Love
    * Kate Nash - Men's Needs
    * Lightspeed Champion - Back To Black
    * Kaiser Chiefs - Golden Skans

Except I can’t, because I don’t have Windows Media Player, because it’s shite. That’s why I ended up on The Wombats MySpace (your honour) and fair ruined my afternoon. Then to Kate Nash’s, where I was surprised and horrified to find her lead song was, not her darling Cribs’ ‘Men’s Needs’, nor indeed one of her own passable oikfests, but an ill-advised and downright irritating, squeaky rendition of ‘Seven Nation Army’ by The White Stripes. I’m only surprised it wasn’t ‘Conquest’.

I guess if I have anything to say here, it’s that covers are sodding lazy. Write your own songs you miserable backslapping bastards! Or at least play about a bit, you know: and I don’t mean add a fucking orchestra, Ronson. Take Pydos in Spydos’ cover of Razorlight’s ‘In The Morning’, for example: a couple of very minor lyrical tweaks and now it’s a song about date rape! Revealling…